Spy Princess (29 page)

According to the prison records, Noor spent the night of 26 November in Karlsruhe and arrived in Pforzheim prison the next day. She had spent nearly one and a half months at Avenue Foch. Pforzheim prison, on the north of the Black Forest, about 20 miles from Karlsruhe, was a civilian prison. Noor’s admission to Pforzheim is recorded in the prison register. She was brought in at 2.30 p.m., and the type of detention was described as ‘protective custody’. Noor also became the first political prisoner to go to Pforzheim.

On direct instructions from Berlin, Noor was classified as a ‘highly dangerous prisoner’ and ‘to be treated in accordance with regulations for “
Nacht und Nebel
” prisoners.’
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The full term
Nacht und Nebel – Rückkehr Unerwünscht
meant Night and Fog – Return Not Required. It was the expression used for people who ‘disappeared’. No reply of any kind was ever given to any inquiry from friends or relatives of the person arrested under this category.

Noor was to be kept on the lowest rations, in solitary confinement and had to be chained hand and foot. A third chain connected her hands to her feet. No one was allowed to talk to her. She was kept in a cell on the ground floor, separated from the other cells by two wire fences with heavily locked gates. Between the two rows of cells, after the wire fences, was a corridor which led into a small inner courtyard. Since she was handcuffed she could not feed or clean herself. This was done by a woman attendant who was also instructed not to speak to her. Isolated in the cell, Noor had no idea of the time and made out the approximate time of day by the times breakfast, lunch and dinner were brought to her. Warders walked the passage outside night and day keeping an eye on the cells.
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Her door was never opened except when the warden visited.

The cells on either side of Noor’s were kept empty. After a few weeks had passed, the governor of the prison, 72-year-old Wilhelm Krauss, took pity on the English girl and decided to remove the chains from her hands.
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But shortly afterwards Josef Gmeiner, the head of the Karlsruhe Gestapo, telephoned him and reprimanded him for not observing the regulations about chains, which had to be strictly adhered to. Noor was shackled once again.

The only people allowed to visit Noor’s cell were Anton Guiller, at that time the Hauptwachtmeister or chief warden, and the woman attendant who cleaned her and brought in a change of clothes once a week. It was Guiller who brought her drinking and washing water and meals. Every Saturday, the woman attendant gave her a change of clothes and dressed her. Her used clothes were taken away. Though she lived on a meagre diet of potato peel or cabbage soup and was weak and hungry, Noor would not let them break her spirit. She exercised in her cell, walking slowly in her shackles, and tried to keep her mind active.

The elderly Krauss felt sorry for Noor. He had never seen a prisoner kept in such harsh conditions. He would sometimes go to her cell, sit on her bed and talk to her. Noor told him that she was half-Indian, that her father had been a sort of priest and that she had studied Indian literature and philosophy. He realised she was an educated and cultured person and developed a great respect for her.
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All the time during her lonely incarceration in Pforzheim, Noor thought about her father and drew strength from his Sufi philosophy. It helped her to meditate and get through the ordeal. She was not allowed any writing material and had nothing to help her pass the time. The small window in her cell was high up and she could not look outside. By seven in the evening the lights were switched off and she had to sit in the dark or sleep.

Back in England, her family had no idea that she was a prisoner. Despite some initial doubts F-section still believed that she was free and were responding to the messages being sent on her wireless set by Goetz and Placke. In October 1943, F-section had received reports that Noor and Garry had been arrested
¹⁹
but when the Germans came on air using her radio, they thought she was free. By Christmas, under cover of seasonal messages, they had put a few trick questions to Noor about her family, which they knew only she could answer, to test if her messages were genuine. But after a little delay they received answers to these. Vogt had learnt some facts about Noor’s family during his conversations with her at Avenue Foch. He had seen Noor’s letter to her mother and gathered she was close to her. Noor had mentioned her casually, never thinking this information could be of any importance to the Gestapo. But Vogt used these facts to reply to F-section and soon they were confident that Noor was still transmitting. Even Antelme, who got to know her well in Paris, was taken into their confidence by SOE chiefs and shown her correspondence to decide whether it looked as though it had been sent by the Germans. Marks told him about Noor’s special security check and how he was sure she had sent him a warning, but Antelme too did not believe it and said he thought she may have used it by accident.
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London continued to play into the hands of the Germans by sending supplies of arms and cash as requested by Operation Nurse.

The weeks passed by in the cold German cell and Noor knew that the new year had begun. She spent a lonely birthday in her cell and hoped that 1944 would bring news of the invasion and Allied victories. Unknown to her, Baker Street had promoted her to the rank of Ensign with effect from 1 January 1944.

That month, a group of French women political prisoners was sent to Pforzheim prison. One of them was Yolande Lagrave from Bordeaux. She was repatriated on 1 May 1945. All the others in her group were murdered. After the war Yolande went looking for Noor. She wrote to the commanding officer of the Service Officers in order to find out whether ‘Nora Baker’ had returned from deportation but the letter was returned marked ‘not known at this address’. She then contacted the War Office and informed them about her association with Noor in Pforzheim prison.

Yolande was in Cell Number 12 with two other prisoners, Rosy Storcke and Suzy Chireiz. Noor was in Cell Number 1, which was across the corridor with the two wire fences in between. Yolande described how she managed to establish contact with an ‘English parachutist who was interned and very unhappy’.
²¹

The French women prisoners were put through a rigorous regime at Pforzheim. They were woken up at 6.30 a.m. and had to clean their cells before the guard came. At 7.30 they were given some breakfast consisting of weak coffee and bread. They were then allowed to walk in the courtyard in a circle as the guards watched over them. At lunchtime they were given a bowl of soup, and a main course usually unfit for consumption made from sour cabbage, crushed peas and swedes. The evening meal was soup again. They had to be in bed by 7 p.m., after which the cells would be dark. Noor’s conditions of captivity were worse as she was in chains and kept on the lowest rations.

Yolande and her colleagues noticed that Cell 1 was never opened even though they knew there was a prisoner inside. One day Yolande’s cellmate, 27-year-old Rosy Storcke, had an idea. The prisoners were given the job of threading tickets through knitting needles to keep them occupied. Rosy thought they could use these knitting needles to scratch a message on their food bowls to establish contact with other prisoners. So they scratched on their bowls – ‘There are three French girls here’.
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The bowls were taken away after lunch to be washed and returned after 5 p.m. with the evening meals. The girls searched eagerly for a response. They were not disappointed. On the back of the bowl was a reply from Noor: ‘You are not alone, you have a friend in Cell 1’. It was the start of their written conversation.

Through these exchanges they learnt that Noor was desperately unhappy, that she never went out, that her hands and feet were in chains. Her cell door was never opened, unlike those of the other prisoners, nor was she given her meal through the small opening in the door at the same time as the other prisoners. Instead she was given her food only when there was no one in the passage and the people who carried the saucepans had passed. While the other prisoners were taken out for short walks, Noor was never allowed outside.

They asked her what her name was, but Noor replied: ‘I cannot, it would be too dangerous.’ She relented, however, and scratched on her bowl:

Nora Baker,

Radio Centre Officer,

Service RAF,

4 Taviton Street,

London

This was the name Noor had used in Paris. Yolande wrote the address down and sewed up the paper carefully in the hem of her skirt, promising herself that she would look for Noor after the war was over. Noor also gave the address of a friend, the head of the school at the Porte de Lilas in Paris. It was from this address that Yolande traced her family later. The messages now became Noor’s only contact with the outside world. There was no prisoner next to her, so she was not able to tap a Morse code on the wall as she had done at Avenue Foch. She was not allowed to write letters so was completely isolated. The notes from the other prisoners cheered her up and kept her going.

The messages exchanged could take days to get through as the bowls were common property and sometimes went to other prisoners. However the steady stream of information carried on. Noor asked her friends if they belonged to the Alliance or to the French section. She told them she was an English agent. ‘Think of me, I am very unhappy,’ Noor wrote to the girls.

One afternoon Yolande and her friends heard a noise in the yard outside and thought it might be Noor coming out. They scrambled on to their beds and looked out of the window. Noor raised her eyes to their cell and the girls exchanged a smile. She was not wearing prison clothes. It was the first time they had seen Noor. From February, as it became clear that Noor was going to be there for a while, Guiller allowed her to walk under supervision in the courtyard for about 45 minutes. Noor would walk around doing gymnastic exercises. She spoke good German and was polite to the officer who let her out.
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Noor was eager for news about the progress of the war. ‘Give me news if you know,’ she scratched on her pot. They told her what they had heard, keeping up her morale.

Noor’s condition in the prison was also reported after the war by Marcel Schubert, who was a prisoner in Pforzheim and was used as an interpreter by the Germans. He related that Noor’s hands and feet were bound nearly all the time, even during meals, for months on end. While the other prisoners could go out for a walk together in the morning, Noor was allowed out only for a very short time in the afternoon and was always heavily guarded. Schubert said the prisoners believed Noor was a Russian countess, but she had told him she was British.
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Kieffer had sent Noor to Pforzheim so he would have an excuse to travel to the area to visit his family. He never came to see her, however. Meanwhile, the Germans continued their radio games on Noor’s wireless sets and deceived Baker Street into sending money and agents. Goetz was delighted to receive half a million francs by Mosquito, which was sent to the Cinema circuit and fell straight into German hands. In the early months of 1944, the Germans started asking for more money and arms supplies.
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London was still completely unaware of Noor’s arrest. On 24 February 1944, Buckmaster wrote a personal recommendation for Noor to be given the George Medal, an award for gallantry. He wrote:

This officer’s devotion to duty enabled contact with this country to be maintained and as a result it was possible to reinforce and reconstruct the group. It is unique in the annals of this organisation that a Circuit which was so completely disintegrated should be able to be rebuilt and this must be attributed to the conduct of this young woman, who, regardless of all personal danger, remained at her post – often alone – and always under the threat of arrest.

It was considered at the time that the risks she was taking were unjustified as the Gestapo knew enough to make her capture only a matter of days. She was therefore, instructed to return to England, but pleaded to be allowed to remain and lie low for a month. This was agreed to and a month later she reported that she felt her security re-established as a result of arrangements she had made. Subsequent events have fully justified this course of action and ever since the reorganising of her circuit Ensign Inayat Khan’s work and example has been beyond praise.

By now Noor had spent nearly four months in prison, and her circuit was blown.

In February 1944, seven agents were parachuted by F-section to two receptions manned by the Gestapo. Four agents were dropped near Poitiers – R.E.J. Alexandre, a 22-year-old French aircraft fitter who was carrying 300,000 francs for Garry who, unknown to F-section, had been imprisoned long ago; Robert Byerly, an American secret service man who had come as a radio operator; Fred Deniset, a Canadian who was to be an arms instructor to Garry, and the Anglo-French Jacques Ledoux, who was going to start a fresh circuit around Le Mans. All four were arrested. The next flight out was on 28/29 February. Despite bad weather, Antelme set out for a second trip to France with Madeleine Damerment as his courier, and Lionel Lee as his radio operator, to set up a circuit called Bricklayer. The instructions about his landing were transmitted to Noor on Operation Nurse. Again, unknown to London, the message had gone straight to the Germans. The three were arrested as they approached Paris and driven to Avenue Foch. Antelme was furious when he realised the deception. He however stuck to his cover story and said he had come to work with Garry and knew nothing. Incarcerated in her cell in Pforzheim, Noor had no idea that Antelme had returned and been arrested. From Avenue Foch, he was sent to Gross Rosen concentration camp where he was killed. Madeleine Damerment was sent to Karlsruhe, from where she would join Noor on the journey to Dachau. Lionel Lee was executed at Gross Rosen. Noor had no knowledge that her radio post had been used to lure agents to their death.